Pro-lifers win limits on new UN criminal court

By James Evans

An international coalition of pro-life lobbyists has successfully checked feminist efforts at a recent United Nations conference to turn pro-life countries, groups, and individuals into criminals.

In a compromise agreement, the term "forced pregnancy," which is code language for legal restrictions on abortion, is still listed as a crime in the statute of the new International Criminal Court (ICC). But its meaning is qualified so that "it shall not be interpreted in any way as affecting national laws relating to pregnancy."

"I wasn't happy, but it's better than no definition," said Gwen Landolt, a pro-life lobbyist representing REAL Women of Canada at the conference.

Delegates from 156 UN member states and 124 non-governmental organizations met from June 15 to July 17 in Rome to reach agreement on a permanent international criminal court to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The final document was approved by 120 nations, with notable opposition from the United States and China.

The U.S. said it could not support a treaty that imposed itself on non-signatory nations. Other opponents argued the ICC violated principles of international law established under the Vienna Convention. Despite these objections, the ICC automatically comes into effect once it is ratified by 66 nations.

Under the statute, the ICC prosecutor will have a wide range of powers to investigate accusations. Landolt worries that Canadian feminist Judge Louise Arbour will be appointed to the powerful position. (Arbour, who has led recent ad hoc international criminal trials, is widely viewed as a lead contender.) If that happens, Landolt says, "‘forced pregnancy' will mean whatever she wants."

During negotiations, the feminist Women's Caucus for Gender Justice adamantly refused to define "forced pregnancy," or to admit that the term refers to the absence of legalized abortion. Yet at an April 21 meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva, members of the Women's Caucus said the term does mean the restriction of abortion.

The Women's Caucus wielded a tremendous amount of influence over the conference negotiations. Valerie Oosterweld, for example, a senior Women's Caucus lobbyist, was also a member of the Canadian government's official delegation.

Feminists pushed hard to ensure "forced pregnancy" would be retained. According to a report by the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, the Women's Caucus gave a presentation July 5 at the Canadian embassy in Rome to 30 sympathetic delegations, instructing them how to ensure "forced pregnancy" would remain in the final statute.

An angry Costa Rican delegate asked committee-of-the-whole chairman Philippe Kirsch (another Canadian), to justify the exclusive meeting. Kirsch claimed the embassy was too small to fit more delegates.

The uproar over the controversial phrase led to a July 7 discussion among delegates over both its inclusion and definition. Faced with opposition to the "forced pregnancy" term from conservative nations such as Ireland, Libya, and Iraq, pro-feminist Bosnia proposed to include a definition in the ICC statute: "Forced pregnancy is the unlawful confinement of a woman made pregnant as a means of targeting a woman both as a human being and as a member of a group."

The definition was identical to that put forward by the Women's Caucus. Sweden unmasked the pro-abortion reality of the term during the debate when it declared that "forcing a women to keep the child over the whole pregnancy" was the last of three stages in the crime of "forced pregnancy."

Pandora's Box

The Vatican, while in favour of the idea of an ICC, adamantly opposed the use of the term. One Vatican spokesperson labelled it a "Pandora's Box" that could turn right-to-life laws into war crimes.

A majority of nations at the official debate opposed including "forced pregnancy." However, the Dutch chairman concluded the session saying there was strong support for the controversial wording.

Several nations expressed reservations about the term because, unlike "rape" and "sexual assault," "forced pregnancy" has no recognized standing in international law. But despite the term's obscurity in international law, the language is nothing new, according to an international law expert.

"As early as 1991, abortion lawyers in the U.S. used ‘forced pregnancy' to describe any pregnancy that could not be terminated on demand," says Richard G. Wilkins of Brigham Young University in Utah.

The ICC idea gained impetus from the war crimes tribunals set up in the early 1990s. This was the first time individuals had been tried for crimes against humanity since the Nuremburg trials that followed World War II. Members of the international community sought to bring to justice those who committed atrocities in the Rwandan massacres and the Yugoslavian civil war.

Since the idea emerged, a group of 50 nations lead by Canada have lobbied for a powerful, independent court. The agenda of this coalition closely mirrors that of feminists and world federalists determined to erode the sovereignty of individual nations, and to challenge traditional moral beliefs. Consequently, the ICC statute refers to issues far beyond the sphere of criminal law.

The English version of the ICC statute, for example, repeatedly uses the ambiguous term "gender."

The term has been used in the past by feminists and gay activists to describe a variety of "sexual orientations," explained Charmaine Graves, who was one of Campaign Life Coalition's representatives at the conference in Rome.

Hard work from pro-lifers eventually produced a compromise. The term "gender" remained in the statute, but with an important qualification in article 20: "Gender refers to the two sexes, male and female, within the context of society."

The phrase "within the context of society" worries some pro-lifers, who fear it will be used to get around the qualification, and to promote redefinitions of marriage and family.

Also, section 37 of the statute lists persecution on the basis of "gender" as a crime against humanity, raising the spectre of feminist and gay social engineering on an unprecedented scale.